Google Buys Plink to Add Talent for Google Goggles

By Clint Boulton |
Posted 2010-04-12

Google Apri1 12 confirmed that it has purchased mobile search startup Plink
for an undisclosed sum, marking the latest in a series of acquisitions the
search engine has made to augment its Web services offerings.

Plink's first application, PlinkArt, lets users
identify paintings by snapping photos of them with their smartphones. When PlinkArt's
recognizes a painting, it will provide information on the artwork and artist,
and allow users to share their favorite pieces with friends or order a print of
the work for their wall.

Plink co-founders Mark Cummins and James Philbin, who
announced the buy in a blog post, said that Plink's 50,000-plus users may
continue to use PlinkArt and new users are welcome to download the app. While
the app as it exists today will not change, Cummins and Philbin said they will
not update PlinkArt again.

Instead, the programmers with PhDs from Oxford said they will
bring their computer vision expertise to Google Goggles, the mobile visual search app Google launched last year for
Android smartphones such as the Motorola Droid and Google Nexus One.

Like PinkArt, Goggles already recognizes artwork, but
its focus is much broader thanks to Google's massive compute scaling
capabilities. Goggles currently recognizes photos of places, monuments, books, company
logos, contacts from business cards, and even some products, such as bottles of
wine.

The app has yet to accurately catalog cars, food, animals
and plants. That's a tip to any computer vision programmers with designs on
landing at Google.

"The visual search engines of today can do some
pretty cool things, but they still have a long long way to go," Cummins
and Philbin wrote. "We're looking forward to helping the Goggles team
build a visual search engine that works not just for paintings or book covers,
but for everything you see around you."

Cummins and Philbin repeated the now common mantra
leaders from Google's newly acquired startups have been uttering; that they
sold out so they could scale.

Specifically, they wrote: "Google has already shown
that it's serious about investing in this space with Google Goggles, and for
the Plink team the opportunity to take our algorithms to Google-scale was just
too exciting to pass up."

The lure of a nice payday for intellectual property and
this so-called "Google-scale" is proving to be an increasingly
lucrative proposition for many startups. Where small companies are concerned,
if Google targets them chances are good Google gets them.

Google began ramping up its acquisition shopping spree in
August 2009 when it targeted On2 Technologies, which it finally acquired after
a price fight. Google also bid $750 million for mobile ad power AdMob, but that
deal is threatened by the Federal Trade Commission's concerns that it will give Google too much power in mobile ads.